What's Keeping You From Buying Your Dream Home?

With so many homes for sale, you might think that it would be easy to get your hands on one. After all, almost everywhere we look, they are for sale. Yet somehow, for so many of us, it never works out quite that way. Even though you could meet the repayments on a wonderful home without any trouble, you find yourself steadied by the need to save up some arbitrary amount to meet the bank's need for a deposit. Without one, you're forced to rent, pouring away money that does nothing to help you own a home of your own, hoping that ever you will be able to scrape enough together.

The trouble is with your rent. If you did not have to pay that, you would be fine. If you just had to pay a mortgage, you would be fine. But trying to meet your rent and also save for a deposit? That just is not feasible. You scrimp and save in the rest of your life, but every time you pay your rent, you're forced to throw away money on a house that is not yours, never will be, and which you can not even paint without permission from the landlord.

That sounds ludicrous, yet it's the position many of us are trapped in thanks to the need to build up a deposit before we buy. So what are our options? The first is to find areas in which we can make financial savings, put all the money we save into a separate account, and hope that it will be enough at some point before the lack of small luxuries in our lives makes us utterly miserable. It rarely works. Extra costs always find ways to show up when we're trying to save, whether it's some unexpected disaster, or simply the landlord raising the rent again. In any case, with the way the economy is, most people have already done a pretty good job of tightening their belts.

You could just be patient, of course. Stay where you are for a year or two, or five, while you save the money piece by piece. If you choose that option, your patience is admirable, but your sense might not be. You could be in a home of your own, building up equity with each repayment, so why keep renting any longer than you have to?

There are loan companies that are prepared to offer help with the cost of buying a home without the need for a substantive deposit. Usually all they ask is that you can prove that you will be able to meet the repayments, and if you can, you will quickly find yourself owning your own home. It is a quicker, more sensible option than the other two, and offers an answer to the problem of the gap that currently exists between the rental and purchasing property markets. With all the houses for sale out there, do not you deserve to finally own one of your own?